Recidive

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A return to crime or wrongdoing after having been punished or corrected for an earlier offence
2. The act of falling back into lawbreaking or other misconduct once a person has already been reformed
3. Repeated wrongdoing by someone who has previously been convicted or chastised for the same kind of fault

Etymology: Recidive is an old English word for the relapse of a criminal or the repetition of a fault, and it descends from a Latin verb that meant "to fall back." Latin "recidere" combined "re-" (back, again) with "cadere" (to fall), and from it came the adjective "recidīvus," meaning "falling back" or "recurring." Its feminine form, "recidīva," gave Middle French "recidive," the source of the English noun. The Latin root is the same one behind "cadence" and "decadent," though those came into English by different routes. English took the word through Middle French, and the source also records a Middle English verb, "resydiven," built directly from Latin "recidīvō." Two English forms therefore existed side by side: a noun borrowed through French and a verb formed from Latin, and the adjective "recidivous" is a doublet of the same Latin word, arriving separately. The word is used mainly in legal and criminological contexts, where it names a return to an offence after punishment.

Synonyms: relapsing, recurrent